The peace movement: debating alliances

Meredith Tax responds to Rebecca Johnson and Pam Bailey: a movement must ensure that its short term tactical aims and alliances do not contradict its long term strategy.

A month ago I
wrote a critique of a Code Pink delegation to Waziristan with Pakistani
politician Imran Khan. My words were
strong and, while some found them objectionable, they have stimulated a rich
debate about alliances, drones, and solidarity by Pam Bailey, Rebecca Johnson,
Afiya Zia and others. Rebecca Johnson says that “various defenders of the patriarchy and
militarism seized on Tax's criticisms as an opportunity to uphold drone warfare
and dismiss Code Pink’s peace and justice activism across the board,” but I have not
been able to find evidence of this online.
In any case, surely open debate about strategy is so essential it is
worth some risk.

I was criticized
for not having posed my questions to Code Pink before I wrote. Since I listen to criticism, before writing
this I sent Medea
Benjamin a number
of questions, which she answered freely and fully.

My main issue with
the campaign was Code Pink’s decision to partner with Imran Khan, whom
Pakistani liberals consider a front for the military and who has made many
statements praising the Afghan Taliban.
Medea Benjamin said that they had originally planned to send their own
delegation, but were working on the anti-drone campaign with Reprieve and Shahzad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer who represents drone victims, and
both suggested Code Pink join Khan’s delegation as a way of getting into
Waziristan. She and other members of
the delegation consider the trip a success because it led to many articles on
drones that otherwise would not have been written.

Despite our
friendly correspondence and the fact that the delegation achieved its purpose
of getting more press for drones, I still question the wisdom of joining Khan’s
delegation. Why? Because a movement needs to ensure that its
short term tactical aims do not contradict its long term strategy. The
following remarks are meant to apply to the peace movement as a whole, not
particularly to Code Pink.

In the late
sixties, when I got involved in the antiwar movement, it was axiomatic that
tactics have to flow from strategy, and strategy has to be based on an analysis
of the world situation. Unfortunately,
the strategy of some in the peace movement is still based on the world as it
was in 1968, when two rival economic and social systems vied for hegemony over
the Global South. At that time, Third
World liberation movements, fighting to get out from under Europe and the US,
got support from the socialist countries and tended to have leftwing politics. It was natural that Western leftists would
identify with these movements.

But that world
died in 1989. Now many populist and
nationalist movements in both the North and Global South are based on rightwing
versions of identity politics inspired by poisonously misogynistic religious
fundamentalism—think of the Christian Right in the US, the Orthodox Right in
Russia and Serbia, and the Muslim Right in large parts of the world. We live at a time of confusing and rapidly
shifting alignments, similar in some ways to the 1930s, when fascist movements
were rising and the Western powers alternately opposed them and colluded with
them. Today, fundamentalist movements
are rising and their relationships are complicated. One day they attack each other and the next day they cooperate at
the UN. With one hand they fight the US
and the World Bank, and with the other, take money from both.

These movements of
the religious right are enormously oppressive and dangerous, most of all to
people in the areas they control.
Leftwing support for them is madness, for leftists are the first people
they will kill if they gain power—one need look no further than Iran to know
that. Yet today on the left, in the
peace movement, and in human rights organizations, people who would never
support groups on the Christian or Jewish Right embrace groups on the Muslim
Right in the name of anti-imperialist solidarity. The 2010 controversy sparked by Gita Sahgal over Amnesty International’s partnership with Cageprisoners was about exactly this problem of
alliances.

During this
controversy, three South Asian feminist activists started a petition which stressed that avoiding dubious alliances is a
matter of principle: “Many of us who work to defend human rights in the context
of conflict and terrorism know the importance of maintaining a clear and
visible distance from potential partners and allies when there is any doubt
about their commitment to human rights.”
The Centre
for Secular Space
was formed partly to support this principle.

This principle
should also be applied in a global campaign against drones. I agree with the
object of this campaign and with the concerns expressed about US
militarism. The issue is particularly
important to American citizens, since our country has violated so many human
rights norms in the course of the “war on terror.” What I disagree with is
developing a campaign against drones in alliance with Imran Khan.

Khan, who has been
fundraising for his political party in California, is good at working the
media—a recent article in the Daily Beast called him “similar to Barak Obama in
2008.” Actually, he’s more similar to Ron Paul; both combine an antiwar message
with rightwing politics. Trudy Cooper, a member of the Code Pink delegation,
has posted several defensive comments saying Khan is the next best thing to
Santa Claus and, if I don’t know this, I must have done lousy research, using
only the “surface media.” But anyone who actually wants to know Khan’s view can
find them out easily—just google “Imran Khan extremism” (over a million
entries), or “Imran Khan Islamism” (over 7 million entries).

You will find Pankaj Mishra saying that “Khan refused in 2006 to support
reforms to the so-called Hudood Ordinance, which exposes rape victims to
charges of adultery unless they can produce four males who witnessed their
violation.” You will find the Indian
paper, The Mail, saying “Imran
Khan has justified his association with Jamaat-ud-Dawa chief Hafiz Saeed, the
key conspirator for the Mumbai attack, saying it was his duty to engage
everyone, ‘however extreme they be’". You will find that Khan's party, PTT, is
part of an electoral
alliance with Jamaat e Islami, a transnational group some of whose
leading members are currently on trial for war crimes in Bangladesh. You can also read about Khan's
speech outside the hospital where
Malala lay after being shot, in which he defended the Afghan Taliban, saying
they were fighting a holy war against the West and were justified by Islamic
law.

Whatever short
term benefits in terms of press might accrue, I think it makes no sense for
pacifists from the Fellowship of Reconciliation, who were part of the delegation to Waziristan, to ally with a frontman for
the Pakistani military, or for members of Code Pink, who oppose violence
against women, to partner with a man who supports the Afghan Taliban even as it
actively promotes violence against women.

I also raised questions in my first article
about whether Code Pink had consulted with Pakistani women’s groups prior to
going on Kahn’s delegation. I asked
because I assumed they wouldn’t have gone if Pakistani feminists had advised
against it; Rebecca Johnson makes the same assumption in her article. Our assumption was incorrect. Medea Benjamin has sent me copies of some of
the advice she received, which said, “If you can do this
trip/project without being too identified with him [Khan] or his party, it
would be much better,” and “Feminists in Pakistan do not like him or his party.
Nevertheless, we are glad you are coming.”
Other advisors, especially those working against drones, came in on the
other side. As Medea Benjamin said in her comment on Johnson’s article, “We weighed the different
comments we heard, and did what we thought was right.”

In the end, of course, one must always
decide for onself. The question is
how. Rebecca Johnson’s suggests, citing
Women in Black, that one should consult with “women on the ground” but not
necessarily do what they advise because they may have conflicting opinions or
be influenced by “countervailing political factors.” I am not sure how far one can extrapolate from Women in Black, a
diverse network of small women’s groups who demonstrate regularly for peace but
disagree on a number of fundamental questions.
I also am uneasy about an implied hierarchy between local and global, as
if global activists inevitably have more of an overview than “women on the
ground.” Certainly, if I were going to
plan a programme in Pakistan, I would listen very carefully indeed to people from
Shirkat Gah, whose perspective is as sophisticated and
transnational as that of any Western peace group, and to the 30 year old
feminist, anti-militarist and anti-fundamentalist Women's Action Forum.

Code Pink is
beginning long-term work in Pakistan so they probably will do that. When I asked Medea Benjamin if she had done
further research on Khan since this controversy, she said, “It
has not made me research more about Imran Khan, as we are not looking for an
ongoing relationship with a Pakistan political party. But the stories we heard
about the Taliban, the shooting of Malala and this discussion have made me want
to do more to support some of the groups we met that are supporting women in
areas where the Taliban operate.”

Pam Bailey’s article on citizen diplomacy, which mentions this
plan to do long term work in Pakistan,
centers on her solidarity work in Gaza. Bailey makes a distinction
between taking leadership, which she feels she can do against US actions in
support of the Israeli occupation, and simply being “present in solidarity”
during conflicts between Palestinian youth and the Hamas government. Likewise, she says, it was proper for Code
Pink to issue a press release in support of Malala but it would not have been
right for them to “take the lead.”

Are these really the only two alternatives? Nobody, least of all me, wants Americans to
try to take the lead in either Gaza or Pakistan. But making connections between issues does not involve taking
over. What bothers me about Bailey’s
approach is­ that such issues are all related.
How can one segregate the topics one can address as an American from
those one can address as a woman or democrat or human rights defender? The
strength of Hamas in Gaza, and its ability to impose a Taliban-like policy of
Islamization on the people there, is related to the brutality of Operation Cast
Lead and the Israeli occupation; the corruption, collaboration and
ineffectiveness of the PLA; and the support of the Muslim Brotherhood. We need
to look at the connections, not only between the US and Israel, but between the
US and the Brotherhood, between militarism and the sequestration of women, and
a thousand other things. We cannot
separate the US role from everything else because the US has its fingers in so
many pies.

What I am hoping for is greater complication,
depth, and sophistication in the approach of the peace movement. A hunkering-down strategy like the one Pam
Bailey proposes in Gaza could lead to that.
A strategy focused on getting press is less likely to do so. This brings us back to the question of
alliances.

I am more familiar
with Code Pink’s work in the US than I am with their work in other
countries. In the US, they have focused
on disruption and performance; as Pam Bailey says, “We
infiltrate closed meetings, we show up at hearings with banners and wearing
pink feather boas, and we travel where others will not tread". This is a media
strategy; its objective is to get the press to pay attention to antiwar issues
and US violations of human rights. In a media strategy, alliances are not too important;
they can be short-term and based on agreement on single issues. The point is to
use the media to excite enough public indignation to force the government to
stop using drones and end the war.

Such media campaigns can be useful for short term aims and
Code Pink is very good at them. But we
also need a long term strategy and, in this age of globalization, it must deal
not only with neoliberal militarism but with movements of religious
fundamentalists all over the world. I
believe the long term strategy of Western feminists and human rights defenders
must be to fight all such regressive forces by building strong, radical
alliances across borders, based on the demands of people in the countries at
war. In this strategy, choosing the
right allies is key, because progressives will have a different agenda from the
religious right. Especially in countries at war, where the US
is involved, it is critical to know and support the broad spectrum of demands
of liberals, secularists, democrats, labor organizers, human rights and sexual
rights defenders, and feminists, and to partner with these forces, rather than
with politicians aligned with fundamentalist groups and the military.

About the author

Meredith
Tax has been a writer and political activist since the late 1960s, and is a Commissioning Editor at openDemocracy 50.50. She
was a member of Bread and Roses, founding chair of International PEN’s
Women Writers’ Committee, founding President of Women’s WORLD,
and a co-founder of the Centre for Secular Space. Her views are her own and do not necessarily represent those of any organisation.

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